Eric Arthur Blair (alias George Orwell, 1903—1950) was a dirty atheist[note 1] socialist is perhaps the most famous anti-authoritarian author. Many ideas and phrases from his novels have entered the English lexicon — especially "Big Brother is watching you" (1984)[2] and "some animals are more equal than others" (Animal Farm).[3] As such, Orwell has become one of those figures, like Jesus Christ and Ronald Reagan, whom people invoke when they want to win an argument without any effort.

That said, he was already not enamored with communismbefore his stint in the Spanish Civil War. During the war, he witnessed atrocities committed by the Stalinist faction against their own allies. He returned as an utter anti-Stalinist and as an advocate of democratic socialism. To that end, at one point he created and provided a list to the Labour Party government of people he suspected of being Soviet infiltrators. His negative view of Stalinism influenced his two best-known novels; Animal Farm is an obvious allegory for Stalin's Soviet Union and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which also criticizes fascism and imperialism.

Orwell's ideas on Britishness and socialism still resonate today, more than 60 years after his death; indeed John Major, the 1990s Conservative Prime Minister, quoted him once when attempting to define what was worth preserving in the country:[6]

He was… an eloquent eulogist of England – John Major's vision of warm beer, cricket on the village green and a redoubtable maiden aunt bicycling to morning communion through the mist was borrowed from Orwell.

Orwell's novel serves as a critique of totalitarianism in general, portraying how the revolution was consumed by sinister forces (and also displaying the inherent weaknesses in the primitive body politic that allowed such a brazen seizure of absolute power). If we were to speculate on any character in the novel based on Orwell, it's probably the wise old donkey who refused to get caught up in the revolutionary bandwagon in the first place.

Mr. Jones, the drunken old farmer, represents Tsar Nicolas II, who was overthrown in the February Revolution. The Return of Jones and the Battle of the Cowshed represent the October Revolution.

Mr. Pilkington is a neighbor farmer and the owner of Foxwood, which represents the British Empire.

Frederick is another neighboring farmer and the owner of Pinchfield. He represents Adolf Hitler, his farm being Nazi Germany. The sale of wood to Frederick represents the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the signing of which immediately preceded World War II), and the fact that the banknotes were counterfeit represent the insincerity of the pact and the German invasion of the USSR in 1941.

Mr. Whymper comes to Animal Farm weekly and deals with Napoleon, providing the pigs whiskey in exchange for various things, such as eggs and Boxer. He represents capitalists who did business with the Soviet Union.

Pig Brother is watching you!

Pigs (communist party members):Vladimir Lenin is notably absent. His role and personality are divided between Old Major, Napoleon and Snowball.

Old Major is most easily interpreted as Karl Marx. An old stud boar, he forms the philosophy of Animalism, an allegory of communism. Old Major is personified as Marx through his original prophecy of an animal utopia at the beginning of the book, and his character later also alludes to Vladimir Lenin, as Old Major's skull is preserved and saluted by the animals of the farm weekly after the revolution, while Lenin's body was also preserved after his death.

Napoleon represents Stalin; he is the dictator of Animal Farm and turns it into a dystopia via power and propaganda in much the same way Stalin did. He also holds general mannerisms which were attributed to Stalin: manipulative, arrogant, cruel, backstabbing, and corrupt with power.

Snowball's ousting and subsequent demonisation is based on Leon Trotsky, who was banished from the Soviet Union in 1929. Snowball can also be seen as a larger personification for general enemies of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Squealer is a personification for the Soviet Union's use of propaganda, as he is seen several times throughout the book justifying the power abuse by the pigs, and is once caught altering the Commandments of Animal Farm, though this is lost on most of the animals there. He is based on Vyacheslav Molotov and Pravda magazine (not the current incarnation of Pravda which is at least as bad).

Horses (workers):

Boxer, the horse, is the strongest animal on the farm. He represents the masses of Soviet workers who loved Stalin and the Soviet Union — dedicated to his job but slightly dimwitted and willing to take anything that Napoleon says as gospel. When Boxer is wounded by Frederick's invasion of Animal Farm and can no longer work, Napoleon sells him to be turned into glue and bonemeal, so that Napoleon can buy another case of whiskey. This represents Stalin's betrayal of the workers. Boxer's motto, "I will work harder", may be a callback to the Stakhanovite movement.

Clover is "a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal." She is simple but not stupid. She never learned to read, but noticed the change in the commandments, and she was the one who persuaded Benjamin to read the final version out loud. It may be inferred that Benjamin would not have done that for anybody but her.

Molly: A pretty but vain and foolish white mare. She's disappointed that there is no one around to give her ribbons or sugar after Farmer Jones is overthrown, so she flees to a neighbouring farm controlled by humans. Molly is an allegory of the decadent capitalists who fled the USSR after the overthrow of the monarchy.

Other animals:

Benjamin is a donkey and one of the most intelligent animals on the farm. He can read and clearly sees what is going on. He keeps his thoughts to himself, ensuring his survival. Clover persuades him to read the final version of the commandments out loud, breaking his habit. Benjamin can be assigned to a variety of real characters, but there are probably always people like him in any revolution.

The sheep of the farm are an allegory for the general public of the Soviet Union, with their bleating of the short Animalist slogan, "Four legs good, two legs bad", and their increased willingness to follow whatever the leadership says; in particular, they are later taught to bleat, "Four legs good, two legs better" instead. See "sheeple".

After the overthrow of the humans, the pigs reveal their work on the concept of Animalism by painting the "Seven Commandments of Animalism" on the wall of the main barn — the original rules by which the animals of Animal Farm were to live by.

Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.

Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.

No animal shall wear clothes.

No animal shall sleep in a bed.

No animal shall drink alcohol.

No animal shall kill any other animal.

All animals are equal.

The sheep of the farm, being too thick to remember all of these, had their rules reduced to "Four legs good, two legs bad!" which they bleated at random — enough to piss anyone off. However, with the corrupting effects of absolute power the pigs amended the Commandments to excuse their own excesses; so that:

No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.

No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.

No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.

Ultimately, Napoleon simply decides to get rid of all the Commandments in a final dictatorial move against the animals, replacing them with but one commandment:[note 4]

The plot centres around a group of animals on the Manor Farm, owned by an incompetent drunk named Mr. Jones. The story starts with the boar Old Major calling a meeting in the main barn, in which he tells the other animals of a dream he had the previous night. In the dream, he sees a land where animals are no longer owned and exploited by humans. Old Major then teaches the animals a related song he remembered from his youth, entitled "Beasts of England". The animals are heartened by the thought of a day when they can work for themselves rather than the humans, and after Old Major dies a few nights later, the pigs of the farm, depicted as the smartest creatures, begin to plan for the revolution, which occurs some months later.

Immediately after the revolution, the farm is renamed "Animal Farm," and seven commandments are instigated by the pigs which dictate the ruling political ideology of "Animalism." As the story develops, the pigs increasingly abuse their power over the oblivious animals. Napoleon ousts the other lead pig Snowball and takes over as head of Animal Farm. He moves into the farmhouse, sleeps in Mr. Jones's bed, drinks his alcohol, and even begins wearing his clothes, all while continually cutting rations for the animals in the farm. Several animals also die at the hands of the pigs in purges where certain animals break down and confess to treasonous crimes.

The pigs also begin to trade with humans for supplies, and Animal Farm is understood to be "at war" with one or two of the neighboring farms, over their alleged harboring of Snowball — whichever farm he was supposedly hiding in was the farm Animal Farm considered the enemy. In order to justify their wacky antics, the pigs alter the Seven Commandments under cover of night to fit in with their obvious breaking of them — this is revealed to the other animals when the pig Squealer is found injured with a bucket of paint at the wall of the Seven Commandments, although few of the animals were able to make sense of it.

The book ends with the pigs one day emerging from the house dressed in human clothes carrying whips. The final scene is of the animals watching Napoleon and the pigs one night in Jones's house, as they drink beer and play cards with the humans from the neighboring farms as friends. The humans commend Napoleon on his exploitation of the animals while Napoleon accepts the humans' friendship, blaming any previous indiscretions on "saboteurs". He announces that the name of the farm is to be changed back to its original name of "Manor Farm" and that the animals will no longer be allowed to address each other as "comrade." All is well until a fight breaks out with both Mr. Pilkington and Napoleon playing the Ace of Spades simultaneously, leaving the animals standing outside, unable to tell the difference between either.

1984 is a dystopian novel set in 1984.[note 5] It tells the tale of a nightmarish future totalitarian state through one helpless man's struggle to hold on to his humanity. It is set in a world where, at least as far as anyone knows, three warring superstates called Oceania (British Empire+North&South America+Australia), Eurasia (Soviet Union+Europe), and Eastasia (China+Japan) exist and have always existed. These three superstates dominate more than 75% of the Earth's surface and fight an ongoing and inconclusive three-way war with constantly shifting alliances, with neither one having an advantage over the other and none able to conquer the other. The old colonial lands of Africa and South Asia are largely ignored, except as meaningless territorial gains. It follows the story of a London bureaucrat named Winston Smith, a propaganda writer for the "Ministry of Truth", as he attempts to make a change, however small, in the opaque and brutal government of "Big Brother", concluding in his betrayal by a Party double agent and his breakdown under torture and brainwashing.

Several phrases coined in the book have entered popular culture[note 6] and common use, most notably "Big Brother (is watching you)," but also the Two Minutes of Hate, doublethink, Thoughtcrimes/Police, Newspeak, and, perhaps unfairly to the memory of Orwell, "Orwellian" as a synonym for totalitarian. Big Brother in particular is a watchword for privacy rights on both sides of the political aisle.

Written in 1948, the book is most obviously a critique of the Stalinist U.S.S.R. (Nineteen Eighty-Four's Ingsoc, or "English Socialism" was imagined as a technologically-advanced development of Stalinism). Although many readers miss the references, the book also critiques fascism and imperialism. Both were much more present in memory in 1948 than in subsequent decades. Thus the Thought Police is a reference to the Japanese Thought Police (the Thought Section of the Criminal Affairs Bureau)[7] and Oceania is unmistakably Winston Churchill's Union of the English-Speaking Peoples (an Anglo-Saxon pan-nationalism that would have seen the United States take responsibility for the British Empire). Orwell understood the evils of British imperialism because he was raised in India and served in Burma.

An Orwellian name is a name an organisation gives itself while actually engaging in the opposite activity the name suggests. It was distinctive of the Communist groups Orwell critiqued, such as "Operation Trust" or "The Hundred Flowers Campaign". Examples of Orwellian regimes are North Korea and DAESH territory.

"Doublethink" describes the act of simultaneously believing in two contradictory concepts. To practice doublethink, a person must "deny the existence of reality" while taking into account "the reality that one denies…"[9] It could be summarized as simultaneously accepting and rejecting a given proposition.

Orwell described doublethink as a "labyrinthine world" where one believes one thing while doing or saying the exact opposite. The very act of practicing doublethink requires a person to employ doublethink — i.e., even though you know doublethink exists, you must deny the existence of doublethink in order to use doublethink. This contradictory concept is at the core of what are now called "Orwellian" social structures.

“”What person would proclaim themselves in favor of "force and fraud"? One of the little tricks Libertarians use in debate is to confuse the ordinary sense of these words with the meaning as "terms of art" in Libertarian axioms. They try to set up a situation where if you say you're against "force and fraud", then obviously you must agree with Libertarian ideology, since those are the definitions.

In the novel, the government attempts to control the thoughts of its citizens, as well as their actions. "Thoughtcrime" is the only type of offence recognised by the Ingsoc government and the punishment is the same regardless of the actual nature of the offence. In his diary, Winston Smith writes that "Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime is death." Newspeak was developed to effectively make thoughtcrime impossible. The Newspeak for thoughtcrime is "crimethink". Thoughtcrime has become an incredibly influential concept in current political discourse, and the word is often used by those opposing censorship, perceived or otherwise, of a particular viewpoint. It's also frequently invoked as a criticism of hate crimelaws, which is a dishonest representation of the intent and content of those laws. After all, the punishment is not for "thinking bad things" but for actually and actively inciting hatred and/or committing violence against others. In the latter case, the hate crime motive is simply seen as an aggravating circumstance meriting harsher punishment of what is already a criminal offence (much like how punishment for murder can be harsher if the murder was premeditated, or how punishment for drug possession can be harsher if the drugs were intended to be sold).

“”As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

"Newspeak" is a language that appears in 1984. Designed by the ruling Ingsoc regime, its purpose is to suppress thought by severely curtailing both the conceptual vocabulary and permissible grammatical structures of Oldspeak. As Orwell describes in the Appendix: "…a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc should be literally unthinkable, at least insofar as thought is dependent on words."[11] The ultimate goal of implementing Newspeak by the Party is to reduce language to its most basic function of simple communication and destroying individual human expression by elimination of antonyms and synonyms, near eradication of adjectives and adverbs, and making amplifiers and negations as simple prefixes (i.e. "doubleplusgood" meaning "great" and "doubleplusungood" meaning "awful".)

This idea of totalitarianism taken to its logical extreme is deeply unsettling, not least for its immediate, intuitive plausibility. As with many of the novel's terms and ideas, it captured the popular imagination and has passed into modern political and cultural discourse, to be variously used, abused and confused by individuals right across the political spectrum.

Orwell's description of Newspeak is imperfect,[note 8] but in essence he imagines language distilled to a brute functionality. Basic needs can be expressed, but beyond this, the available vocabulary is so radically compressed as to prohibit anything other than the most perfunctory description or evaluation of any given object, term or concept.

This compression is achieved by breaking down the distinction between the different parts of speech, so that all remaining words can act as both nouns and verbs. Adjectives and adverbs are formed from these noun-verb roots with the addition of -ful and -wise, respectively. Orwell offers the example of the verb to cut, purged as its meaning is sufficiently contained within the new noun-verb knife.[12] By extension, this would lead to the elimination of verbs such as stab, slash, slice, and carve. Knifeful could replace adjectives as diverse as sharp, cutting, pointed, piercing and incisive.

Grammatically, Newspeak is simplified to an almost infantile, pre-literate degree. Irregular verb forms are suppressed (e.g. got, ran, slept = getted, runned, sleeped) and any word can be negated with the prefix un-, (e.g. good : bad = good : ungood, and presumably unknifeful would mean blunt) allowing the further eradication of hundreds of words. Emphasis is added with the modifiers plus- or doubleplus-, hence perhaps the most famous Newspeak formulation: doubleplusungood (meaning "really really bad").[note 9]

Doublespeak is a neologism used to describe language that is deliberately intended to conceal meaning; for example: enhanced interrogation interviewing techniques used in a sentence to supplement the word torture. The term is not actually from Orwell's novel, but is instead an extra-canonical portmanteau of "doublethink" and "newspeak." Two common forms of doublespeak are euphemisms and management speak.

Newspeak has since become a term for any language that is controlled or abused in the name of political power. Some people have compared some politically correct terminology to Newspeak — this is almost universally critical, comparing unfavorably with the totalitarianism expressed in 1984. It may also be argued that internet slang is basically newspeak.

Words that describe prejudice have been compared to Newspeak. In the case of homophobia, for example, a word has been added to describe a new feeling and attitude that specifically demeaned homosexuality unfairly and unjustly. Arguably this trend continued with the addition of heterophobia — although this is really just be a right-wing re-branding of gay rights rather than a new concept. The purpose of Newspeak, however, was to reduce the number of words in the language, thus removing the ability to express new feelings or attitudes (that this probably wouldn't work in reality is not the issue). Adding words is therefore the opposite of Orwell's original Newspeak — it enables new thoughts to be expressed with new words.

A slightly more realistic application of the term to "political correctness" would be when words are banned or discouraged. This is more in line with the original principle of restricting thought by controlling language. Racist terms such as "nigger", or dirty demeaning terms such as "cunt" are removed from the vocabulary in order to combat racism and offensive language.

Another example of creeping Newspeak is the relentless "positive thinking" tendency which has virtually purged the word "problem" from English (and other languages) in favour of the less overtly negative "challenge". This particular style of language is especially prevalent in management and PR circles.

"Crimestop" is one of Newspeak's less well known concepts, but perhaps the most pertinent (and funny) when discussing the various stripes of fundamentalism. It denotes a learned mental discipline: a conditioned inability even to grasp thoughts contrary to one's own belief system. Orwell writes:[13]

"Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

"Big Brother" is a terrible reality tv show the embodiment of the totalitarian state. In theory, Big Brother is always watching the populace and controls their every move. In practice Big Brother functions like Bentham's Panopticon — Big Brother isn't always watching. In fact, most of the time, Big Brother is not watching. But Big Brother has set up a system where Big Brother can always watch, but you will never know when Big Brother is watching. This omnipresent surveillance has a chilling effect — essentially, even though Big Brother isn't always watching, it's the same as if they were.

In the novel the "Thought Police" are agents of Big Brother's totalitarian government. In the real world the term is used to describe those people who would like to control other people's lives to the extent that the expression of certain thoughts is banned. They would prefer to be able to control the actual thoughts themselves, but not yet being gods, they grudgingly accept that it is still only the expression that they can do anything about. They can be seen as a totalitarian right-wing equivalent of the political correctness movement.

Many arguments for leftist socioeconomic policy have been argued against as being "Orwellian", while, ironically, Orwell himself was a leftist and a democratic socialist, fighting for the anarcho-communist CNT/FAI in the Spanish Civil War. He even wrote a book about it, Homage to Catalonia. Even more ironically, Orwell spoke against the obfuscation of language and was particularly opposed to people using precise terms in the wrong context, yet "Orwellian" has been applied to even the most benevolent of world leaders.

It has become popular to use the book as an attack on socialism in general (as opposed to the totalitarian regimes of the communists), while ignoring the fact that Orwell himself was a committed socialist.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is particularly beloved by conservatives because of its supposed applicability to the issue of political correctness. This rather flies in the face of Orwell's political beliefs, and his opinions on the extreme form of totalitarianism known as Stalinism was formed by his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War as a foreign irregular.[16]

The Road to Wigan Pier (1937):[19] Continues the theme of Down and Out. Details the conditions of workers in the north of England. Advocates for a broad-tent form of socialism that did not exclude workers or the lower middle class.

↑We're exaggerating on that one; he was a semi-observant Anglican, though expressing skepticism of religion.

↑Claiming Orwell is a popular right-wing sport in America, like hunting for baby seal pelts.

↑Animal Farm was published in August 1945 in England (originally named Animal Farm: A Fairy Story) and in 1946 in North America, with "A Fairy Story" being dropped from the title. See A Note on the Text, Peter Davison, 2000.

↑Of course, Orwell himself probably wouldn't like his name being used in this sense

↑It would have been an immense (and somewhat anal) undertaking to realise his vision completely, and completely unnecessary for the purposes of the novel.

↑It is conjectured that, since Orwell had a bad experience with Esperanto in 1927, he gave Newspeak a simplistic grammar and vocabulary as a kind of "take that" against Esperanto's deliberate use of these concepts.